cloud

What happens if your 'cloud' fails?

For all the benefits of "the cloud," there are two primary problems:

Lock-in to the platform. Where are you going to go with your application once you've written it for a particular cloud platform? Some promise portability, but it's still a question worth asking. You're at the mercy of someone else for uptime.

This second item has always seemed like less of an issue given that the companies involved (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.) are all fantastic at operations. Surely they can do better than you or I could?

With Google's AppEngine going down yesterday, … Read more

Google App Engine suffers outages

One advantage of cloud computing is that it's an expert's job to keep the centralized computing infrastructure up and running. But even experts have problems, and that's what's going on Tuesday with Google's App Engine.

The service has been having outages Tuesday, according to a mailing list posting Tuesday. App Engine, launched in April and still in "preview release" mode, is a service that lets people create interactive Web applications written in the Python programming language.

"We've experienced several outages during the past 12 hours, the most recent of which started … Read more

Google Docs gets limited PDF support

Google Docs, the online office suite from the search giant, now has some limited but still useful support for PDF files.

People using the service now can upload and view documents encoded with the widely used and now standardized Portable Document Format initially created by Adobe Systems. People also can transfer PDFs stored on the Web. (Look below for a screenshot showing the two-pane PDF view.)

The move, announced on the Google Docs blog Friday, isn't much of a surprise. In addition to the fact that it makes eminent sense, close observers already had begun seeing signs that hinted … Read more

Google's right, but cloud computing's timeline isn't so clear

Earlier Tuesday, a Google executive by the name of Rishi Chandra made the argument that the move to cloud computing was just a matter of time.

""The next 10 years of innovations are going to be in the cloud. Enterprise software is not going away, but there is a transition taking place," he said during a conference taking place in Boston.

I don't know whether it will be 10 years or not, but that's the trend. Nobody still seriously argues that it won't be easier to run word processors or spreadsheets off a central … Read more

Daily Debrief: Handicapping the cloud computing transition

Amazon may have had its ups and downs lately, but Google is still brimming with confidence about the future course of enterprise computing on the Web. Earlier Tuesday, a Google exec by the name of Rishi Chandra went on record predicting that the move to cloud computing is no longer a matter of when but a question of how long it will take to speed the transition.

Check out my interview with News.com's Stephen Shankland on Tuesday's Daily Debrief. Shankland offers some interesting context to Chandra's remarks.

Mark Lucovsky visits the Gillmor Gang

This week's Friday Gillmor Gang podcast featured Mark Lucovsky, currently head of Google's search APIs and formerly a top technologist at Microsoft (reportedly Steve Ballmer threw a chair across the room upon being informed that Lucovsky was getting hitched to Google).

Lucovsky talked about making Google's APIs available to developers. The APIs include high-speed access to Google search via Javascript and RESTful protocols, peer APIs about accessing APIs, language APIs for detecting languages and translations, and hosting of third-party open Javascript libraries, such as Mootools.

"We are opening up all of Google bit-by-bit programmatically," Lucovsky … Read more

Satellite images link polluted clouds to lack of rain

New methods of using satellites to examine clouds are helping scientists to understand how pollution influences rainfall.

Researchers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have used a group of satellites known as the Afternoon Constellation, or A-Train, to peer into the chemical composition and behaviors of clouds.

"Typically, it is very hard to get a sense of how important the effect of pollution on clouds is," Anne Douglass, deputy project scientist for NASA's Aura satellite, said in a statement. "With the A-Train, we can see the clouds every day and we're getting confirmation on … Read more

Google to preach Web 2.0 gospel to developers

Just because Google so obviously loves the idea of cloud computing, don't think the company doesn't care about what happens at the other end of the network connection, too.

As former President Bill Clinton used to say, there's a third way: Google wants to improve technology on both the server in the cloud and on the client running a Web browser. The search giant will detail its approach to at least 2,800 developers paying to attend the first Google I/O conference this week in San Francisco.

There's been a long-running tension among computing companies … Read more

Software margins choked by the cloud?

Microsoft expects to lose margins as "cloud" competitors start to eat away at its core businesses.

Kudos to Microsoft for calling out the obvious. But the software maker still has a lot to learn, if it thinks it can charge more under its own cloud model because "the customer will pay Microsoft a larger fee, since Microsoft also runs and maintains all the hardware," as Nick Carr notes:

Capossela's assumption that Microsoft will be able to charge companies more under the cloud model seems optimistic, given the different economics of providing software as a Web service and the aggressive pricing strategies of cloud pioneers like Google, Zoho, and Amazon.

Put more bluntly, there's not a chance in Hades that Microsoft will be able to charge more for its cloud-based offerings--not when its competitors are using the cloud to pummel its desktop and server-based offerings. This is something that Microsoft (and everyone else) is simply going to have to get used to. The go-go days of outrageous software margins are over. Done.… Read more

Apple missing golden .Mac opportunity

If you're buying a computer to get onto the Internet, don't you think you'd be interested in a service that makes that computer much easier to use with the Internet?

Over the last five years, people have grown more accustomed to storing personal photos, documents, and files in the "cloud," rather than on a hard drive in their home. At the same time, they are buying Apple's Macs in larger numbers than ever. The company's answer to this trend has been its .Mac service, a $99-a-year collection of online tools released in 2002 … Read more